I return to this blog every once in a while and I'm not sure if I should keep it live or not. Over a decade later I love getting to look back on my thoughts and processes as a young mother with a little toddler boy in my twenties. I am now pushing forty, my son will be a teenager in a couple of weeks and he has a younger eight year old delightful brother. I don't get nearly as much time for art, gardening and writing as I did during those early years of mothering and I am recently divorced but some things have remained the same. I still love justice and community work and exploring identity, I still love mothering and I love my Good Creator. Also my spelling and grammar is still awful but I have since learned why my writing will be full of errors because I now know I am neurodivergent. But beyond being littered with grammatical errors, something else that I need to acknowledge about my writing a decade ago was that it reflected my knowledge and political education of that stage of life. I was becoming awakened to a number of political issues and naming those issues with the language I have available to me. Now as an equity educator I have better naming practices, for example, I know that "B" in Black has to be capitalized when discussing my people. I know we don't talk about "prostitution" but we talk about "Sex Work". I know that when discussing Mad-Identifying Folks we need to capitalize those identities as well. I sometimes want to go back and make corrections to my writing but it feels dishonest and not reflective of my skill and knowledge at the time. I am open to feedback on best practice on this. However, for now I do want to include this acknowledgement that on this forum a lot of the public reflections include language that is outdated or not considered to be best practice for naming lived experience or populations. I also just need to send enormous love to my younger self. Wow, isn't she courageous and persistent? Thank you younger self for hanging on so I could emerge. You are trying so hard to tell the truth even though sometimes you have not yet learned to find your own truth and stand in it. Thank you Good Creator for helping me hang on!! 💕
Love,
37 Year Old Fanis
P.S. Creator is healing me and I am being healed.
